overstating harm, community responsibility, and the duty of repair
299 pages
English language
Published Oct. 12, 2016
From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning. Rooting the problem of escalation in negative group relationships, Schulman illuminates the ways cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept. She illustrates how Supremacy behavior and Traumatized behavior resemble each other, through a shared inability to tolerate difference. This important and sure to be controversial book illuminates such contemporary and historical issues of personal, racial, and geo-political difference as tools of escalation towards injustice, exclusion, and punishment, whether the objects of dehumanization are other individuals in our families …
From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning. Rooting the problem of escalation in negative group relationships, Schulman illuminates the ways cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept. She illustrates how Supremacy behavior and Traumatized behavior resemble each other, through a shared inability to tolerate difference. This important and sure to be controversial book illuminates such contemporary and historical issues of personal, racial, and geo-political difference as tools of escalation towards injustice, exclusion, and punishment, whether the objects of dehumanization are other individuals in our families or communities, people with HIV, African Americans, or Palestinians. Conflict Is Not Abuse is a searing rejection of the cultural phenomenon of blame, cruelty, and scapegoating, and how those in positions of power exacerbate and manipulate fear of the "other" to achieve their goals. Sarah Schulman is a novelist, nonfiction writer, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and AIDS historian, and the author of eighteen books. A Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellow, Sarah is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Her novels published by Arsenal include Rat Bohemia , Empathy , After Delores , and The Mere Future . She lives in New York.
For every 'hmmm' in this book, there were half a dozen 'aha's, and not the good kind. Some of the nuance and perspective in this book is badly needed. I'd like to know of any work done to clean up the apologia and focus on the better aspects discussed. But there are entire chapters in this thing basically defending abuse from an abusers perspective. Read with caution.
(Copied from an old twitter thread, Apr 2022)
Oof, this book is a slog to get through. Not to mention the many fundamental flaws.
For example: the whole chapter about how she believes communication is overly restrictive today is written from a place of deep fear of messing up and an inability to read social queues. Thereby doing the thing she warns about in the book: overstating harm.
I can’t say the book is written from a neurotypical perspective because I don’t know that about the author. I would say though it is written assuming a neurotypical perspective and audience.
A lot of the difficulties she describes are common among various neurodivergencies but instead of exploring that she denies these perspectives as overly sensitive.
Her insistence of in-person talking over text communication also shows a generational divide. It’s understandable that she’s not super fluent in asynchronous communication but she doesn’t …
(Copied from an old twitter thread, Apr 2022)
Oof, this book is a slog to get through. Not to mention the many fundamental flaws.
For example: the whole chapter about how she believes communication is overly restrictive today is written from a place of deep fear of messing up and an inability to read social queues. Thereby doing the thing she warns about in the book: overstating harm.
I can’t say the book is written from a neurotypical perspective because I don’t know that about the author. I would say though it is written assuming a neurotypical perspective and audience.
A lot of the difficulties she describes are common among various neurodivergencies but instead of exploring that she denies these perspectives as overly sensitive.
Her insistence of in-person talking over text communication also shows a generational divide. It’s understandable that she’s not super fluent in asynchronous communication but she doesn’t acknowledge this. Instead she generalizes her perspective and dismisses alternatives.
Another fundamental mistake is the assumption that conflict and abuse are a strict binary and mutually exclusive, as if both can’t exist simultaneously in messy overlaps and interconnections. A lot of the book is built on this assumption and therefore on very shaky ground.
And she continues to bring Israel and Palestine into this, for no good reason really, which I’m not qualified to unpack but the way she uses it and the discourse about it as an example in various places feels contrived at best.
DNF, 25%
I wanted to like this so bad from the premise.
A lot of old person shouts at cloud. She has this whole thing where she thinks its ok to stalk people that don't want to talk to her. There's like an entire chapter on it.
A summary of her arguments:
lack of communication causes conflict
conflict leads to shunning as a first response
Interpersonal shunning, leads to the invocation of the state
Communication will resolve conflict
Abuse is bad, and that we often use the term when there's not a power imbalance
We should treat abuse and conflict diffently
* We have a responsibility to resolve conflicts in family and other social groups.
What get on my nerves is she doesn't really back up that shunning is happening, as a first response, her shunning model isn't one that matches any organisational behaviour research I know of, and infact …
DNF, 25%
I wanted to like this so bad from the premise.
A lot of old person shouts at cloud. She has this whole thing where she thinks its ok to stalk people that don't want to talk to her. There's like an entire chapter on it.
A summary of her arguments:
lack of communication causes conflict
conflict leads to shunning as a first response
Interpersonal shunning, leads to the invocation of the state
Communication will resolve conflict
Abuse is bad, and that we often use the term when there's not a power imbalance
We should treat abuse and conflict diffently
* We have a responsibility to resolve conflicts in family and other social groups.
What get on my nerves is she doesn't really back up that shunning is happening, as a first response, her shunning model isn't one that matches any organisational behaviour research I know of, and infact individual relationships work differently than group dynamics.
Go read a book on non-violent communication rather than this.
This book has some infuriating problems, but I think you should read it anyway.
